The Six Enneads, by Plotinus

Ninth Tractate.

On the Good, or the One.

1. It is in virtue of unity that beings are beings.

This is equally true of things whose existence is primal and of all that are in any degree to be numbered among
beings. What could exist at all except as one thing? Deprived of unity, a thing ceases to be what it is called: no army
unless as a unity: a chorus, a flock, must be one thing. Even house and ship demand unity, one house, one ship; unity
gone, neither remains thus even continuous magnitudes could not exist without an inherent unity; break them apart and
their very being is altered in the measure of the breach of unity.

Take plant and animal; the material form stands a unity; fallen from that into a litter of fragments, the things
have lost their being; what was is no longer there; it is replaced by quite other things — as many others, precisely,
as possess unity.

Health, similarly, is the condition of a body acting as a co-ordinate unity. Beauty appears when limbs and features
are controlled by this principle, unity. Moral excellence is of a soul acting as a concordant total, brought to
unity.

Come thus to soul — which brings all to unity, making, moulding, shaping, ranging to order — there is a temptation
to say “Soul is the bestower of unity; soul therefore is the unity.” But soul bestows other characteristics upon
material things and yet remains distinct from its gift: shape, Ideal-Form and the rest are all distinct from the giving
soul; so, clearly, with this gift of unity; soul to make things unities looks out upon the unity just as it makes man
by looking upon Man, realizing in the man the unity belonging to Man.

Anything that can be described as a unity is so in the precise degree in which it holds a characteristic being; the
less or more the degree of the being, the less or more the unity. Soul, while distinct from unity’s very self, is a
thing of the greater unity in proportion as it is of the greater, the authentic, being. Absolute unity it is not: it is
soul and one soul, the unity in some sense a concomitant; there are two things, soul and soul’s unity as there is body
with body’s unity. The looser aggregates, such as a choir, are furthest from unity, the more compact are the nearer;
soul is nearer yet but still a participant.

Is soul to be identified with unity on the ground that unless it were one thing it could not be soul? No; unity is
equally necessary to every other thing, yet unity stands distinct from them; body and unity are not identical; body,
too; is still a participant.

Besides, the soul, even the collective soul for all its absence of part, is a manifold: it has diverse powers —
reasoning, desiring, perceiving — all held together by this chain of unity. Itself a unity, soul confers unity, but
also accepts it.

2. It may be suggested that, while in the unities of the partial order the essence and the unity are distinct, yet
in collective existence, in Real Being, they are identical, so that when we have grasped Being we hold unity; Real
Being would coincide with Unity. Thus, taking the Intellectual-Principle as Essential Being, that principle and the
Unity Absolute would be at once Primal Being and Pure Unity, purveying, accordingly, to the rest of things something of
Being and something, in proportion, of the unity which is itself.

There is nothing with which the unity would be more plausibly identified than with Being; either it is Being as a
given man is man or it will correspond to the Number which rules in the realm of the particular; it will be a number
applying to a certain unique thing as the number two applies to others.

Now if Number is a thing among things, then clearly so this unity must be; we would have to discover what thing of
things it is. If Number is not a thing but an operation of the mind moving out to reckon, then the unity will not be a
thing.

We found that anything losing unity loses its being; we are therefore obliged to enquire whether the unity in
particulars is identical with the being, and unity absolute identical with collective being.

Now the being of the particular is a manifold; unity cannot be a manifold; there must therefore be a distinction
between Being and Unity. Thus a man is at once a reasoning living being and a total of parts; his variety is held
together by his unity; man therefore and unity are different — man a thing of parts against unity partless. Much more
must Collective Being, as container of all existence, be a manifold and therefore distinct from the unity in which it
is but participant.

Again, Collective Being contains life and intelligence — it is no dead thing — and so, once more, is a manifold.

If Being is identical with Intellectual-Principle, even at that it is a manifold; all the more so when count is
taken of the Ideal Forms in it; for the Idea, particular or collective, is, after all, a numerable agglomeration whose
unity is that of a kosmos.

Above all, unity is The First: but Intellectual-Principle, Ideas and Being, cannot be so; for any member of the
realm of Forms is an aggregation, a compound, and therefore — since components must precede their compound — is a
later.

Other considerations also go to show that the Intellectual-Principle cannot be the First. Intellect must be above
the Intellectual Act: at least in its higher phase, that not concerned with the outer universe, it must be intent upon
its Prior; its introversion is a conversion upon the Principle.

Considered as at once Thinker and Object of its Thought, it is dual, not simplex, not The Unity: considered as
looking beyond itself, it must look to a better, to a prior: looking simultaneously upon itself and upon its
Transcendent, it is, once more, not a First.

There is no other way of stating Intellectual-Principle than as that which, holding itself in the presence of The
Good and First and looking towards That, is self-present also, self-knowing and Knowing itself as All-Being: thus
manifold, it is far from being The Unity.

In sum: The Unity cannot be the total of beings, for so its oneness is annulled; it cannot be the
Intellectual-Principle, for so it would be that total which the Intellectual-Principle is; nor is it Being, for Being
is the manifold of things.

3. What then must The Unity be, what nature is left for it?

No wonder that to state it is not easy; even Being and Form are not easy, though we have a way, an approach through
the Ideas.

The soul or mind reaching towards the formless finds itself incompetent to grasp where nothing bounds it or to take
impression where the impinging reality is diffuse; in sheer dread of holding to nothingness, it slips away. The state
is painful; often it seeks relief by retreating from all this vagueness to the region of sense, there to rest as on
solid ground, just as the sight distressed by the minute rests with pleasure on the bold.

Soul must see in its own way; this is by coalescence, unification; but in seeking thus to know the Unity it is
prevented by that very unification from recognising that it has found; it cannot distinguish itself from the object of
this intuition. Nonetheless, this is our one resource if our philosophy is to give us knowledge of The Unity.

We are in search of unity; we are to come to know the principle of all, the Good and First; therefore we may not
stand away from the realm of Firsts and lie prostrate among the lasts: we must strike for those Firsts, rising from
things of sense which are the lasts. Cleared of all evil in our intention towards The Good, we must ascend to the
Principle within ourselves; from many, we must become one; only so do we attain to knowledge of that which is Principle
and Unity. We shape ourselves into Intellectual-Principle; we make over our soul in trust to Intellectual-Principle and
set it firmly in That; thus what That sees the soul will waken to see; it is through the Intellectual-Principle that we
have this vision of The Unity; it must be our care to bring over nothing whatever from sense, to allow nothing even of
soul to enter into Intellectual-Principle: with Intellect pure, and with the summit of Intellect, we are to see the
All-Pure.

If quester has the impression of extension or shape or mass attaching to That Nature he has not been led by
Intellectual-Principle which is not of the order to see such things; the activity has been of sense and of the
judgement following upon sense: only Intellectual-Principle can inform us of the things of its scope; its competence is
upon its priors, its content and its issue: but even its content is outside of sense; and still purer, still less
touched by multiplicity, are its priors, or rather its Prior.

The Unity, then, is not Intellectual-Principle but something higher still: Intellectual-Principle is still a being
but that First is no being but precedent to all Being; it cannot be a being, for a being has what we may call the shape
of its reality but The Unity is without shape, even shape Intellectual.

Generative of all, The Unity is none of all; neither thing nor quantity nor quality nor intellect nor soul; not in
motion, not at rest, not in place, not in time: it is the self-defined, unique in form or, better, formless, existing
before Form was, or Movement or Rest, all of which are attachments of Being and make Being the manifold it is.

But how, if not in movement, can it be otherwise than at rest?

The answer is that movement and rest are states pertaining to Being, which necessarily has one or the other or both.
Besides, anything at rest must be so in virtue of Rest as something distinct: Unity at rest becomes the ground of an
attribute and at once ceases to be a simplex.

Note, similarly, that, when we speak of this First as Cause, we are affirming something happening not to it but to
us, the fact that we take from this Self-Enclosed: strictly we should put neither a This nor a That to it; we hover, as
it were, about it, seeking the statement of an experience of our own, sometimes nearing this Reality, sometimes baffled
by the enigma in which it dwells.

4. The main part of the difficulty is that awareness of this Principle comes neither by knowing nor by the
Intellection that discovers the Intellectual Beings but by a presence overpassing all knowledge. In knowing, soul or
mind abandons its unity; it cannot remain a simplex: knowing is taking account of things; that accounting is multiple;
the mind, thus plunging into number and multiplicity, departs from unity.

Our way then takes us beyond knowing; there may be no wandering from unity; knowing and knowable must all be left
aside; every object of thought, even the highest, we must pass by, for all that is good is later than This and derives
from This as from the sun all the light of the day.

“Not to be told; not to be written”: in our writing and telling we are but urging towards it: out of discussion we
call to vision: to those desiring to see, we point the path; our teaching is of the road and the travelling; the seeing
must be the very act of one that has made this choice.

There are those that have not attained to see. The soul has not come to know the splendour There; it has not felt
and clutched to itself that love-passion of vision known to lover come to rest where he loves. Or struck perhaps by
that authentic light, all the soul lit by the nearness gained, we have gone weighted from beneath; the vision is
frustrate; we should go without burden and we go carrying that which can but keep us back; we are not yet made over
into unity.

From none is that Principle absent and yet from all: present, it remains absent save to those fit to receive,
disciplined into some accordance, able to touch it closely by their likeness and by that kindred power within
themselves through which, remaining as it was when it came to them from the Supreme, they are enabled to see in so far
as God may at all be seen.

Failure to attain may be due to such impediment or to lack of the guiding thought that establishes trust; impediment
we must charge against ourselves and strive by entire renunciation to become emancipate; where there is distrust for
lack of convincing reason, further considerations may be applied:

5. Those to whom existence comes about by chance and automatic action and is held together by material forces have
drifted far from God and from the concept of unity; we are not here addressing them but only such as accept another
nature than body and have some conception of soul.

Soul must be sounded to the depths, understood as an emanation from Intellectual-Principle and as holding its value
by a Reason-Principle thence infused. Next this Intellect must be apprehended, an Intellect other than the reasoning
faculty known as the rational principle; with reasoning we are already in the region of separation and movement: our
sciences are Reason-Principles lodged in soul or mind, having manifestly acquired their character by the presence in
the soul of Intellectual-Principle, source of all knowing.

Thus we come to see Intellectual-Principle almost as an object of sense: the Intellectual Kosmos is perceptible as
standing above soul, father to soul: we know Intellectual-Principle as the motionless, not subject to change,
containing, we must think, all things; a multiple but at once indivisible and comporting difference. It is not
discriminate as are the Reason-Principles, which can in fact be known one by one: yet its content is not a confusion;
every item stands forth distinctly, just as in a science the entire content holds as an indivisible and yet each item
is a self-standing verity.

Now a plurality thus concentrated like the Intellectual Kosmos is close upon The First — and reason certifies its
existence as surely as that of soul — yet, though of higher sovereignty than soul, it is not The First since it is not
a unity, not simplex as unity, principle over all multiplicity, must be.

Before it there is That which must transcend the noblest of the things of Being: there must be a prior to this
Principle which aiming towards unity is yet not unity but a thing in unity’s likeness. From this highest it is not
sundered; it too is self-present: so close to the unity, it cannot be articulated: and yet it is a principle which in
some measure has dared secession.

That awesome Prior, The Unity, is not a being, for so its unity would be vested in something else: strictly no name
is apt to it, but since name it we must there is a certain rough fitness in designating it as unity with the
understanding that it is not the unity of some other thing.

Thus it eludes our knowledge, so that the nearer approach to it is through its offspring, Being: we know it as cause
of existence to Intellectual-Principle, as fount of all that is best, as the efficacy which, self-perduring and
undiminishing, generates all beings and is not to be counted among these its derivatives, to all of which it must be
prior.

This we can but name The Unity, indicating it to each other by a designation that points to the concept of its
partlessness while we are in reality striving to bring our own minds to unity. We are not to think of such unity and
partlessness as belong to point or monad; the veritable unity is the source of all such quantity which could not exist
unless first there existed Being and Being’s Prior: we are not, then, to think in the order of point and monad but to
use these — in their rejection of magnitude and partition — as symbols for the higher concept.

6. In what sense, then, do we assert this Unity, and how is it to be adjusted to our mental processes?

Its oneness must not be entitled to that of monad and point: for these the mind abstracts extension and numerical
quantity and rests upon the very minutest possible, ending no doubt in the partless but still in something that began
as a partible and is always lodged in something other than itself. The Unity was never in any other and never belonged
to the partible: nor is its impartibility that of extreme minuteness; on the contrary it is great beyond anything,
great not in extension but in power, sizeless by its very greatness as even its immediate sequents are impartible not
in mass but in might. We must therefore take the Unity as infinite not in measureless extension or numerable quantity
but in fathomless depths of power.

Think of The One as Mind or as God, you think too meanly; use all the resources of understanding to conceive this
Unity and, again, it is more authentically one than God, even though you reach for God’s unity beyond the unity the
most perfect you can conceive. For This is utterly a self-existent, with no concomitant whatever. This self-sufficing
is the essence of its unity. Something there must be supremely adequate, autonomous, all-transcending, most utterly
without need.

Any manifold, anything beneath The Unity, is dependent; combined from various constituents, its essential nature
goes in need of unity; but unity cannot need itself; it stands unity accomplished. Again, a manifold depends upon all
its factors; and furthermore each of those factors in turn — as necessarily inbound with the rest and not self-standing
— sets up a similar need both to its associates and to the total so constituted.

The sovranly self-sufficing principle will be Unity-Absolute, for only in this Unity is there a nature above all
need, whether within itself or in regard to the rest of things. Unity seeks nothing towards its being or its well-being
or its safehold upon existence; cause to all, how can it acquire its character outside of itself or know any good
outside? The good of its being can be no borrowing: This is The Good. Nor has it station; it needs no standing ground
as if inadequate to its own sustaining; what calls for such underpropping is the soulless, some material mass that must
be based or fall. This is base to all, cause of universal existence and of ordered station. All that demands place is
in need; a First cannot go in need of its sequents: all need is effort towards a first principle; the First, principle
to all, must be utterly without need. If the Unity be seeking, it must inevitably be seeking to be something other than
itself; it is seeking its own destroyer. Whatever may be said to be in need of a good is needing a preserver; nothing
can be a good to The Unity, therefore.

Neither can it have will to anything; it is a Beyond-Good, not even to itself a good but to such beings only as may
be of quality to have part with it. Nor has it Intellection; that would comport diversity: nor Movement; it is prior to
Movement as to Intellection.

To what could its Intellection be directed? To itself? But that would imply a previous ignorance; it would be
dependent upon that Intellection in order to knowledge of itself; but it is the self-sufficing. Yet this absence of
self-knowing does not comport ignorance; ignorance is of something outside — a knower ignorant of a knowable — but in
the Solitary there is neither knowing nor anything unknown. Unity, self-present, it has no need of self-intellection:
indeed this “self-presence” were better left out, the more surely to preserve the unity; we must eliminate all knowing
and all association, all intellection whether internal or external. It is not to be though of as having but as being
Intellection; Intellection does not itself perform the intellective act but is the cause of the act in something else,
and cause is not to be identified with caused: most assuredly the cause of all is not a thing within that all.

This Principle is not, therefore, to be identified with the good of which it is the source; it is good in the unique
mode of being The Good above all that is good.

7. If the mind reels before something thus alien to all we know, we must take our stand on the things of this realm
and strive thence to see. But, in the looking, beware of throwing outward; this Principle does not lie away somewhere
leaving the rest void; to those of power to reach, it is present; to the inapt, absent. In our daily affairs we cannot
hold an object in mind if we have given ourselves elsewhere, occupied upon some other matter; that very thing must be
before us to be truly the object of observation. So here also; preoccupied by the impress of something else, we are
withheld under that pressure from becoming aware of The Unity; a mind gripped and fastened by some definite thing
cannot take the print of the very contrary. As Matter, it is agreed, must be void of quality in order to accept the
types of the universe, so and much more must the soul be kept formless if there is to be no infixed impediment to
prevent it being brimmed and lit by the Primal Principle.

In sum, we must withdraw from all the extern, pointed wholly inwards; no leaning to the outer; the total of things
ignored, first in their relation to us and later in the very idea; the self put out of mind in the contemplation of the
Supreme; all the commerce so closely There that, if report were possible, one might become to others reporter of that
communion.

Such converse, we may suppose, was that of Minos, thence known as the Familiar of Zeus; and in that memory he
established the laws which report it, enlarged to that task by his vision There. Some, on the other hand, there will be
to disdain such citizen service, choosing to remain in the higher: these will be those that have seen much.

God — we read — is outside of none, present unperceived to all; we break away from Him, or rather from ourselves;
what we turn from we cannot reach; astray ourselves, we cannot go in search of another; a child distraught will not
recognise its father; to find ourselves is to know our source.

8. Every soul that knows its history is aware, also, that its movement, unthwarted, is not that of an outgoing line;
its natural course may be likened to that in which a circle turns not upon some external but on its own centre, the
point to which it owes its rise. The soul’s movement will be about its source; to this it will hold, poised intent
towards that unity to which all souls should move and the divine souls always move, divine in virtue of that movement;
for to be a god is to be integral with the Supreme; what stands away is man still multiple, or beast.

Is then this “centre” of our souls the Principle for which we are seeking?

We must look yet further: we must admit a Principle in which all these centres coincide: it will be a centre by
analogy with the centre of the circle we know. The soul is not a circle in the sense of the geometric figure but in
that it at once contains the Primal Nature [as centre] and is contained by it [as circumference], that it owes its
origin to such a centre and still more that the soul, uncontaminated, is a self-contained entity.

In our present state — part of our being weighed down by the body, as one might have the feet under water with all
the rest untouched — we bear — ourselves aloft by that — intact part and, in that, hold through our own centre to the
centre of all the centres, just as the centres of the great circles of a sphere coincide with that of the sphere to
which all belong. Thus we are secure.

If these circles were material and not spiritual, the link with the centres would be local; they would lie round it
where it lay at some distant point: since the souls are of the Intellectual, and the Supreme still loftier, we
understand that contact is otherwise procured, that is by those powers which connect Intellectual agent with
Intellectual Object; this all the more, since the Intellect grasps the Intellectual object by the way of similarity,
identity, in the sure link of kindred. Material mass cannot blend into other material mass: unbodied beings are not
under this bodily limitation; their separation is solely that of otherness, of differentiation; in the absence of
otherness, it is similars mutually present.

Thus the Supreme as containing no otherness is ever present with us; we with it when we put otherness away. It is
not that the Supreme reaches out to us seeking our communion: we reach towards the Supreme; it is we that become
present. We are always before it: but we do not always look: thus a choir, singing set in due order about the
conductor, may turn away from that centre to which all should attend: let it but face aright and it sings with beauty,
present effectively. We are ever before the Supreme — cut off is utter dissolution; we can no longer be — but we do not
always attend: when we look, our Term is attained; this is rest; this is the end of singing ill; effectively before
Him, we lift a choral song full of God.

9. In this choiring, the soul looks upon the wellspring of Life, wellspring also of Intellect, beginning of Being,
fount of Good, root of Soul. It is not that these are poured out from the Supreme lessening it as if it were a thing of
mass. At that the emanants would be perishable; but they are eternal; they spring from an eternal principle, which
produces them not by its fragmentation but in virtue of its intact identity: therefore they too hold firm; so long as
the sun shines, so long there will be light.

We have not been cut away; we are not separate, what though the body-nature has closed about us to press us to
itself; we breathe and hold our ground because the Supreme does not give and pass but gives on for ever, so long as it
remains what it is.

Our being is the fuller for our turning Thither; this is our prosperity; to hold aloof is loneliness and lessening.
Here is the soul’s peace, outside of evil, refuge taken in the place clean of wrong; here it has its Act, its true
knowing; here it is immune. Here is living, the true; that of to-day, all living apart from Him, is but a shadow, a
mimicry. Life in the Supreme is the native activity of Intellect; in virtue of that converse it brings forth gods,
brings forth beauty, brings forth righteousness, brings forth all moral good; for of all these the soul is pregnant
when it has been filled with God. This state is its first and its final, because from God it comes, its good lies
There, and, once turned to God again, it is what it was. Life here, with the things of earth, is a sinking, a defeat, a
failing of the wing.

That our good is There is shown by the very love inborn with the soul; hence the constant linking of the Love-God
with the Psyches in story and picture; the soul, other than God but sprung of Him, must needs love. So long as it is
There, it holds the heavenly love; here its love is the baser; There the soul is Aphrodite of the heavens; here, turned
harlot, Aphrodite of the public ways: yet the soul is always an Aphrodite. This is the intention of the myth which
tells of Aphrodite’s birth and Eros born with her.

The soul in its nature loves God and longs to be at one with Him in the noble love of a daughter for a noble father;
but coming to human birth and lured by the courtships of this sphere, she takes up with another love, a mortal, leaves
her father and falls.

But one day coming to hate her shame, she puts away the evil of earth, once more seeks the father, and finds her
peace.

Those to whom all this experience is strange may understand by way of our earthly longings and the joy we have in
winning to what we most desire — remembering always that here what we love is perishable, hurtful, that our loving is
of mimicries and turns awry because all was a mistake, our good was not here, this was not what we sought; There only
is our veritable love and There we may hold it and be with it, possess it in its verity no longer submerged in alien
flesh. Any that have seen know what I have in mind: the soul takes another life as it approaches God; thus restored it
feels that the dispenser of true life is There to see, that now we have nothing to look for but, far otherwise, that we
must put aside all else and rest in This alone, This become, This alone, all the earthly environment done away, in
haste to be free, impatient of any bond holding us to the baser, so that with our being entire we may cling about This,
no part in us remaining but through it we have touch with God.

Thus we have all the vision that may be of Him and of ourselves; but it is of a self-wrought to splendour, brimmed
with the Intellectual light, become that very light, pure, buoyant, unburdened, raised to Godhood or, better, knowing
its Godhood, all aflame then — but crushed out once more if it should take up the discarded burden.

10. But how comes the soul not to keep that ground?

Because it has not yet escaped wholly: but there will be the time of vision unbroken, the self hindered no longer by
any hindrance of body. Not that those hindrances beset that in us which has veritably seen; it is the other phase of
the soul that suffers and that only when we withdraw from vision and take to knowing by proof, by evidence, by the
reasoning processes of the mental habit. Such logic is not to be confounded with that act of ours in the vision; it is
not our reason that has seen; it is something greater than reason, reason’s Prior, as far above reason as the very
object of that thought must be.

In our self-seeing There, the self is seen as belonging to that order, or rather we are merged into that self in us
which has the quality of that order. It is a knowing of the self restored to its purity. No doubt we should not speak
of seeing; but we cannot help talking in dualities, seen and seer, instead of, boldly, the achievement of unity. In
this seeing, we neither hold an object nor trace distinction; there is no two. The man is changed, no longer himself
nor self-belonging; he is merged with the Supreme, sunken into it, one with it: centre coincides with centre, for on
this higher plane things that touch at all are one; only in separation is there duality; by our holding away, the
Supreme is set outside. This is why the vision baffles telling; we cannot detach the Supreme to state it; if we have
seen something thus detached we have failed of the Supreme which is to be known only as one with ourselves.

11. This is the purport of that rule of our Mysteries: Nothing Divulged to the Uninitiate: the Supreme is not to be
made a common story, the holy things may not be uncovered to the stranger, to any that has not himself attained to see.
There were not two; beholder was one with beheld; it was not a vision compassed but a unity apprehended. The man formed
by this mingling with the Supreme must — if he only remember — carry its image impressed upon him: he is become the
Unity, nothing within him or without inducing any diversity; no movement now, no passion, no outlooking desire, once
this ascent is achieved; reasoning is in abeyance and all Intellection and even, to dare the word, the very self;
caught away, filled with God, he has in perfect stillness attained isolation; all the being calmed, he turns neither to
this side nor to that, not even inwards to himself; utterly resting he has become very rest. He belongs no longer to
the order of the beautiful; he has risen beyond beauty; he has overpassed even the choir of the virtues; he is like one
who, having penetrated the inner sanctuary, leaves the temple images behind him — though these become once more first
objects of regard when he leaves the holies; for There his converse was not with image, not with trace, but with the
very Truth in the view of which all the rest is but of secondary concern.

There, indeed, it was scarcely vision, unless of a mode unknown; it was a going forth from the self, a simplifying,
a renunciation, a reach towards contact and at the same time a repose, a meditation towards adjustment. This is the
only seeing of what lies within the holies: to look otherwise is to fail.

Things here are signs; they show therefore to the wiser teachers how the supreme God is known; the instructed priest
reading the sign may enter the holy place and make real the vision of the inaccessible.

Even those that have never found entry must admit the existence of that invisible; they will know their source and
Principle since by principle they see principle and are linked with it, by like they have contact with like and so they
grasp all of the divine that lies within the scope of mind. Until the seeing comes they are still craving something,
that which only the vision can give; this Term, attained only by those that have overpassed all, is the
All-Transcending.

It is not in the soul’s nature to touch utter nothingness; the lowest descent is into evil and, so far, into
non-being: but to utter nothing, never. When the soul begins again to mount, it comes not to something alien but to its
very self; thus detached, it is not in nothingness but in itself; self-gathered it is no longer in the order of being;
it is in the Supreme.

There is thus a converse in virtue of which the essential man outgrows Being, becomes identical with the
Transcendent of Being. The self thus lifted, we are in the likeness of the Supreme: if from that heightened self we
pass still higher — image to archetype — we have won the Term of all our journeying. Fallen back again, we awaken the
virtue within until we know ourselves all order once more; once more we are lightened of the burden and move by virtue
towards Intellectual-Principle and through the Wisdom in That to the Supreme.

This is the life of gods and of the godlike and blessed among men, liberation from the alien that besets us here, a
life taking no pleasure in the things of earth, the passing of solitary to solitary.

This web edition published by:

eBooks@Adelaide
The University of Adelaide Library
University of Adelaide
South Australia 5005